Quiz Time: In 5 seconds or less, name a Spanish bank that is trading above €5 a share.

BEEP! (Sound of bug zapper)

Trick question, there isn’t one….SAN 4.40

BBVA 4.72
BKIA 1.43
POP 1.88
SAB 1.49
CABK 2.19
BKT 2.93

Triggers for Troika Action

The point of this little quiz farce is to highlight the Spanish banks’ delicate condition, and this is likely where the true battle for the Euro zone lies. While Greece appears ready to implode, the ECB, the IMF, and the EU (Troika) will be mapping out a contagion ring fence plan for Spain. The … ...READ MORE

On Tuesday, Indiana Republican voters turned away from a senator who had been in Congress for 36 years by voting out 80 year old Richard Lugar and voting in Tea Party backed Richard Murdock. This was not a close race and Murdock won with over 60% of the vote. Yet, Lugar didn’t acknowledge that the electorate had sent a clear message and instead lashed out at his opponent. “His (Murdock) embrace of an unrelenting partisan mindset is irreconcilable with my philosophy of governance and my experience of what brings results for Hoosiers in the Senate. In effect, what he has … ...READ MORE

Last night, former Bank of England governor Sir John Gieve said that the regulatory drive for banks to strengthen their safety buffers is dragging down lending and holding back the recovery. This is the conundrum for regulators in banking as they attempt to strengthen the financial system by making banks hold more reserves, which creates the unintended consequence of lower lending that undermines the economy and spirals back into undermining the financial system. … ...READ MORE

On Monday, the lunch panel entitled, “Global Overview: Shifting Fortunes,” was charged with providing a big-picture look at the global economy to provide clarity to a very muddled picture. The panel covered macroeconomic trends around the world, including U.S. recovery and Europe’s slowdown; the world’s new balance of economic power, which emerging markets will be able to sustain growth over the long term – and which might be headed for turbulence; geopolitical risk in the Middle East and beyond, plus the effects of spiking oil prices; elections are coming up in many of the world’s largest nations; and finally what … ...READ MORE

Topics Today: The Busch Update April 25th, 2012: Middle Markets, FOMC, Spring Data, and Social Security

The Middle Market The National Center for the Middle Market has produced a new indicator for the middle market that looks promising. The indicator is a quarterly business performance update and economic outlook survey conducted among 1,000 C-suite executives of companies with annual revenues between $10MM – < $1B. Here are their key findings and interesting graphics...

FOMC Quickie: Status QuoThe three legged stool of Bernanke, Dudley and Yellen all support the language of 2014 and believe the data is too mixed to change it.

Speaking of mixed data… Our Jennifer Lee writes, … ...READ MORE

In a follow-up to what I wrote yesterday and to highlight the massive challenge to US policy makers, I thought it would be instructive to share comments from uber-blogger Keith Hennessey on the state of Social Security. Hennessey makes these two disturbing points:

Point 1: If you do not change Social Security’s promised benefit payouts you would need to set aside $23.2 trillion today to permanently fill the hole between promised Social Security benefits and dedicated Social Security taxes (almost all of which are payroll taxes).

Point 2: For the next two decades demographics are a bigger driver of entitlement … ...READ MORE

From the Netherlands to France, European citizens and politicians are shifting their views on austerity and growth. The straitjacket of Maastricht is forcing countries into downward debt spirals that exacerbate not alleviate the descent. Growth is paramount to sustainability not just reducing spending or raising taxes. If you don’t grow, you can’t grow your tax receipts and you can’t service your debt at any level. This is the lesson of Greece and why it will remain a ward of the European Union until it restructures the remaining debt to levels that can be supported by current tax receipts. Therefore, it … ...READ MORE

Yesterday, Social Security released their Trustee’s report on the state of the fund’s finances and it wasn’t pretty. Here’s their sobering commentary: “Social Security and Medicare are the two largest federal programs, accounting for 36 percent of federal expenditures in fiscal year 2011. Both programs will experience cost growth substantially in excess of GDP growth in the coming decades due to aging of the population and, in the case of Medicare, growth in expenditures per beneficiary exceeding growth in per capita GDP. Through the mid-2030s, population aging caused by the large baby-boom generation entering retirement and lower-birth-rate generations entering employment … ...READ MORE

Over the weekend, the newsflow was decided negative as both economics and politics “broke bad” to drive Risk-Off trading. Stating the obvious, the key for any market is the consistency of the information that is received to enhance or detract from the current themes. Clearly, mixed data or newsflow produces mixed market reaction. If the information is decided in one direction, the moves can be substantial especially given the advent of technology that allows for instantaneous trading across all instruments. This drives the “Risk-On” or “Risk-Off” trades.

Given this, let’s take a look at what happened over the weekend. First, … ...READ MORE